Crazy Desires of a Murderer (or Morbid Vices of a Housemaid, to give it its Italian title, or Faceless Characters in a Dark Hallway, to give it my title) was made several years after the giallo boom peaked, and it's sort of one of those gialli which attempted to cross-pollinate with another genre, in this case crime/gangster films. I say 'sort of' because this is one of the worst examples of genre bending you'll ever see - the gangster and drug dealing element could not seem more shoehorned in if the bags of heroin were literally wedged somewhere using a shoehorn. Tying it all together (both in narrative and investigative terms) is an eccentric inspector who seems to have been modelled on Hercule Poirot, although what the egg-headed Belgian would have made of the bizarre goings on here is anyone's guess (he'd probably have cottoned on to several obvious clues a bit quicker than his facsimile though).
Returning to visit her wheelchair-bound father in his town/country villa/castle (I'd wager that a couple of very different locations were used for said building) Ileana brings a mixture of old and new friends to stay for a weekend of semi-debauchery. After one of the friends is murdered, and her eyes plucked out, an idiosyncratic inspector shows up to investigate. Is the murderer one of Ileana's friends, a mixture of drug smugglers and bed-hoppers? Or is it the butler (Hugh Denis), the doctor (Robin Williams), Ileana's mute brother who has a fondness for embalming animals and removing their eyeballs (Julian Casablancas) or the maid (she doesn't really look like anyone famous)?
In giallo terms, this is a classic set up of 'rich people gather for a jolly good party somewhere and then someone gets murdered'. In this instance the murders don't pile up (at all) - the film isn't overly short (88 mins) but Filippo Walter Ratti struggles to keep on too of all the 'action'. The group of friends disappear for pretty much the entire final third of the film, and the drug smuggling subplot never really intersects with the main storyline at all, at least until Inspector Poirot casually mentions it during the dénoument (which takes place in a courtyard rather than a Poirovian drawing room). Much of the film adopts a 'don't show, don't tell' policy, with fairly oblique plotting, leaving the viewer to plot their own through line to try and figure out what's going on. This interactive element is something I often enjoy in a film, but here it seems to be necessitated by accidental incompetence rather than deliberately elliptical or obfuscatory storytelling.
Corrado Gaipa's inspector is modelled on Poirot to the extent that his repeated insistence that the various characters gathered in the villa/castle have something to hide is taken almost verbatim from The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. His eccentricities are likely modelled on Poirot's as well, although if the latter listened in to two people arguing about something which sounds a lot like a missing load of drugs, he probably wouldn't have allowed one of them to pop out to the graveyard in the garden and then drive off into the night unobserved, particularly if he had a police force at his beck and call (to be fair, calling in help from the wider police force tends not to be a feature of detective-led gialli, probably because having a load of cops chipping in would lead to the killer being caught in a quicker but more boring manner [or, in the case of The Three Sisters, because I couldn't afford to pay any other actors to be policemen]).
One device used by Ratti which is worth briefly examining is a recurring shot of an eye looking through a keyhole during an interrogation scene (which, to give the film its dues, is fairly creatively done, especially for 1977, with the various characters' questioning edited seamlessly together to create one long showcase of/introduction to the zany inspector). The shot is repeated once more towards the end of the film as well. The eye depicted is unquestionably a female one (unless one of the male characters likes dressing up in drag and wearing fake eyebrows when in their 'regular' guise), and the sting which plays on the soundtrack every time (EVERY time) the shot repeats during the interrogation scene is clearly meant to sound ominous, suggesting that the killer is watching proceedings. However, all we're really seeing is somebody watching other people, and there's no real reason to suppose that the voyeur is the killer. In fact if the eye is observing all that is shown between the repeated shots of it, there's no way that the person watching actually is the killer. We never find out who it is, and we may indeed be meant to take the eye to be the killer's, but a) it's not the killer's eye, and b) it's impossible to watch yourself be interrogated through a doorway. Despite this likely being another example of lazy/incompetent filmmaking, one could also make a case of it being a prime example of how aural and visual cues can encourage the viewer to infer something which is actually never directly implied.
Speaking of aural cues, the (opening and closing) credits play out over the most pathetic dirge imaginable, but fortunately most of the actual film is accompanied by decent choonage. The direction is solid in terms of shot selection, but, as suggested by my alt. title, there are an awful lot of shots in which characters' faces are obscured. This isn't necessarily the director's fault, though, as the plot, and the guilty secrets harboured by most of the characters, necessitate a lot of creeping about in the dark. The problem is that it just isn't overly engaging after a while to watch a lot of creatively framed people sneaking about the place at night. The first murder scene is a bit of a showstopper - it contains some Fulci-esque full-on eyeball fun, as well as a close-up of the knife going into a pair of prosthetic tits (which look a bit fake, but in this case that's necessary in order to make them look real [ie the actress has fake tits I think]). It's not an especially showstopping scene overall, at it just involves someone creeping up on a sleeping lady and mutilating her, but the make-up effects are of a standard that further onscreen carnage would have been welcomed (the efforts of that department appear to have mainly been directed towards making animal replicas; at least, I hope they were replicas). All in all, then, this is not a Great Giallo. The Inspector is moderately diverting, some of the locations and effects are nice, and there's a quite nice scene where the maid stands in front of the mirror wearing just a collar. But overall, it's a somewhat less-than-nice entry into the filone.
IF YOU are in a wheelchair, why are you (and several other characters in Italian films-I'm looking at you, Baron Blood) living in a gaff with a load of stairs?
Returning to visit her wheelchair-bound father in his town/country villa/castle (I'd wager that a couple of very different locations were used for said building) Ileana brings a mixture of old and new friends to stay for a weekend of semi-debauchery. After one of the friends is murdered, and her eyes plucked out, an idiosyncratic inspector shows up to investigate. Is the murderer one of Ileana's friends, a mixture of drug smugglers and bed-hoppers? Or is it the butler (Hugh Denis), the doctor (Robin Williams), Ileana's mute brother who has a fondness for embalming animals and removing their eyeballs (Julian Casablancas) or the maid (she doesn't really look like anyone famous)?
In giallo terms, this is a classic set up of 'rich people gather for a jolly good party somewhere and then someone gets murdered'. In this instance the murders don't pile up (at all) - the film isn't overly short (88 mins) but Filippo Walter Ratti struggles to keep on too of all the 'action'. The group of friends disappear for pretty much the entire final third of the film, and the drug smuggling subplot never really intersects with the main storyline at all, at least until Inspector Poirot casually mentions it during the dénoument (which takes place in a courtyard rather than a Poirovian drawing room). Much of the film adopts a 'don't show, don't tell' policy, with fairly oblique plotting, leaving the viewer to plot their own through line to try and figure out what's going on. This interactive element is something I often enjoy in a film, but here it seems to be necessitated by accidental incompetence rather than deliberately elliptical or obfuscatory storytelling.
Corrado Gaipa's inspector is modelled on Poirot to the extent that his repeated insistence that the various characters gathered in the villa/castle have something to hide is taken almost verbatim from The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. His eccentricities are likely modelled on Poirot's as well, although if the latter listened in to two people arguing about something which sounds a lot like a missing load of drugs, he probably wouldn't have allowed one of them to pop out to the graveyard in the garden and then drive off into the night unobserved, particularly if he had a police force at his beck and call (to be fair, calling in help from the wider police force tends not to be a feature of detective-led gialli, probably because having a load of cops chipping in would lead to the killer being caught in a quicker but more boring manner [or, in the case of The Three Sisters, because I couldn't afford to pay any other actors to be policemen]).
One device used by Ratti which is worth briefly examining is a recurring shot of an eye looking through a keyhole during an interrogation scene (which, to give the film its dues, is fairly creatively done, especially for 1977, with the various characters' questioning edited seamlessly together to create one long showcase of/introduction to the zany inspector). The shot is repeated once more towards the end of the film as well. The eye depicted is unquestionably a female one (unless one of the male characters likes dressing up in drag and wearing fake eyebrows when in their 'regular' guise), and the sting which plays on the soundtrack every time (EVERY time) the shot repeats during the interrogation scene is clearly meant to sound ominous, suggesting that the killer is watching proceedings. However, all we're really seeing is somebody watching other people, and there's no real reason to suppose that the voyeur is the killer. In fact if the eye is observing all that is shown between the repeated shots of it, there's no way that the person watching actually is the killer. We never find out who it is, and we may indeed be meant to take the eye to be the killer's, but a) it's not the killer's eye, and b) it's impossible to watch yourself be interrogated through a doorway. Despite this likely being another example of lazy/incompetent filmmaking, one could also make a case of it being a prime example of how aural and visual cues can encourage the viewer to infer something which is actually never directly implied.
Speaking of aural cues, the (opening and closing) credits play out over the most pathetic dirge imaginable, but fortunately most of the actual film is accompanied by decent choonage. The direction is solid in terms of shot selection, but, as suggested by my alt. title, there are an awful lot of shots in which characters' faces are obscured. This isn't necessarily the director's fault, though, as the plot, and the guilty secrets harboured by most of the characters, necessitate a lot of creeping about in the dark. The problem is that it just isn't overly engaging after a while to watch a lot of creatively framed people sneaking about the place at night. The first murder scene is a bit of a showstopper - it contains some Fulci-esque full-on eyeball fun, as well as a close-up of the knife going into a pair of prosthetic tits (which look a bit fake, but in this case that's necessary in order to make them look real [ie the actress has fake tits I think]). It's not an especially showstopping scene overall, at it just involves someone creeping up on a sleeping lady and mutilating her, but the make-up effects are of a standard that further onscreen carnage would have been welcomed (the efforts of that department appear to have mainly been directed towards making animal replicas; at least, I hope they were replicas). All in all, then, this is not a Great Giallo. The Inspector is moderately diverting, some of the locations and effects are nice, and there's a quite nice scene where the maid stands in front of the mirror wearing just a collar. But overall, it's a somewhat less-than-nice entry into the filone.
IF YOU are in a wheelchair, why are you (and several other characters in Italian films-I'm looking at you, Baron Blood) living in a gaff with a load of stairs?
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